Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara is a well-known and respected civil rights activist, professor of English and African American studies, editor of two anthologies of black literature, and author of short stories and novels. According to Alice A. Deck in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "In many ways Toni Cade Bambara is one of the best representatives of the group of Afro-American writers who, during the 1960s, became directly involved in the cultural and sociopolitical activities in urban communities across the country." Deck points out that "Bambara is one of the few who continued to work within the black urban communities (filming, lecturing, organizing, and reading from her works at rallies and conferences), producing imaginative reenactments of these experiences in her fiction. In addition, Bambara established herself over the years as an educator, teaching in colleges and independent community schools in various cities on the East Coast."

Bambara's first two books of fiction, Gorilla, My Love and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, are collections of her short stories. Susan Lardner remarks in the New Yorker that the stories in these two works, "describing the lives of black people in the North and the South, could be more exactly typed as vignettes and significant anecdotes, although a few of them are fairly long.... All are notable for their purposefulness, a more or less explicit inspirational angle, and a distinctive motion of the prose, which swings from colloquial narrative to precarious metaphorical heights and over to street talk, at which Bambara is unbeatable."

In a review of Gorilla, My Love, for example, a writer assesses in the Saturday Review that the stories "are among the best portraits of black life to have appeared in some time. [They are] written in a breezy, engaging style that owes a good deal to street dialect." A critic writing in Newsweek makes